Celebrations!

Multiple ANVIL successes to celebrate!

Molly Bright

Congratulations are in order for three outstanding accomplishments from ANVIL lab members this past month!

Becca Clements (2nd year PhD student in BME) was awarded a 3-year fellowship from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program! This will fund her exploration into the organization of vascular regulation in the human brain, and particularly the presence of long-distance “vascular networks” that may support typical functional neural networks.

Kim Hemmerling (4th year PhD student in BME) received a stellar 6%ile score on her NIH F31 Predoctoral Fellowship application! This score reflects the amazing potential for the spinal cord fMRI methods she has been developing in our lab, and specifically towards looking at atypical upper limb movement patterns post-stroke.

And finally, Max Wang (Postbac Research Technologist) has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship! Max will pursue his Masters research in translational neuroimaging at the University of Nottingham in the UK starting this fall.

These successes reflect the impressive ongoing hard work and perseverance of our trainee researchers. We are so pleased to see these efforts acknowledged and rewarded, and we are looking forward to seeing what new science emerges as they begin these exciting projects. Congratulations Becca, Kim, and Max!

Lab awarded NIH funding for clinical trial to enhance brain blood flow

Molly Bright

Molly has been awarded a two-year R21 grant from NINDS to determine the ability of Acute Intermittent Hypoxia therapy to enhance blood flow in the brain of healthy adults. This controlled cross-over trial is an exploratory “high-risk, high-reward” study that examines whether a simple intervention can increase resting cerebral perfusion and the vasodilatory responsiveness of cerebral blood vessels. The intervention is already used in several studies at Northwestern University and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab to evoke neural plasticity for rehabilitation, and this study explores whether it also achieves vascular plasticity. Participants will undergo three weeks of regular, brief exposures to hypoxia, and advanced arterial spin labeling MRI techniques and MRI-compatible gas challenges will be used to assess the impact on the cerebrovasculature. Recruitment starting soon; see the Current Studies page for more information!

Congratulations to Apoorva Ayyagari on completing her Masters Degree!

Molly Bright

The Bright Lab celebrates Apoorva Ayyagari’s completion of her MS degree in Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern! After 2 excellent years as a core member of our lab, Apoorva successfully defended her MS thesis, titled “Understanding noise in spinal cord BOLD fMRI data with a breath-hold paradigm to investigate feasibility of studying vascular reactivity“. In this work, she rigorously assesses cardiac and respiratory noise, motion confounds, and co-linearity between different physiologic signals in spinal cord imaging data. Spinal cord fMRI data are notoriously challenging to work with due to all of these artifactual signals, and this thesis reflects excellent progress in understanding and modeling these factors. Apoorva’s many contributions in the lab will continue to benefit our ongoing projects in mapping cerebrovascular reactivity amplitude and latency, standardizing how physiologic data is collected during MRI scanning, preprocessing spinal cord fMRI data, and quantifying relationships between different sources of signal variance in these data. Although we are extremely sad to see her go, we wish Apoorva the very best as she starts her new job in human factors engineering in Evanston. Congrats Apoorva!

Dr. Rachael Stickland receives NUCATS pilot grant

Molly Bright

Congratulations to postdoctoral fellow Dr. Rachael Stickland on her success in the NUCATS Pilot Grant program! Over the coming year, Dr. Stickland will be assessing a multi-parametric imaging protocol focused on cerebrovascular function, testing reliability in healthy participants then translating into patients. This project will use the RespirAct™ to deliver carbon dioxide in a carefully controlled, breath-by-breath basis during concurrent MRI scanning to characterize the associated vasodilatory response. More information about NUCATS can be found on their website.

Molly Bright elected to the ISMRM Brain Function Study Group committee

Molly Bright

PI Molly Bright has just been elected as secretary of the Current Issues in Brain Function Study Group of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. She will be introduced formally at the annual meeting in Montreal, and will have a 4-year tenure advancing through the committee positions until finishing as Chair in 2023.

All interested in imaging brain function are invited to attend the study group meeting in Montreal, which will be held on Tuesday, May 14th, 13:30-14:30. We’re looking forward to working closely with the committee and members of the study group!

 

Career Development Award for PI Molly Bright

Molly Bright

We are excited to announce that Molly Bright has received an Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Engineering Research Career Development (K12) Award! The IREK12 program recruits and trains scholars with engineering and other quantitative backgrounds to become successful rehabilitation scientists in basic, translational and/or clinical research. The award will fund research in adapting fMRI methodology for use in pediatric brain injury, constructing and validating new models of the BOLD signal in individual children, and then applying these techniques to study atypical motor systems in pediatric-onset hemiplegia. For more information about the IREK12 program, see the consortium’s webpage.